There were some “24 karat gold” cards (made my Bleacher if I remember correctly) sold via television home shopping channels during the 1990s that also had stones — rubies if I remember correctly — but as clear as I can remember, Pinnacle Brands was the first company to incorporate actual pieces of stones (diamonds) into mainstream baseball cards when they brought us The Diamond Club inserts in 1996 Pinnacle Zenith.

It was cool in theory. I mean aside from putting cash into cards, actual gem stones are the only other way to ensure that a card in your collection has some real value outside of just this hobby. But those early cards were poorly produced. They were the same thickness as regular cards and the stone was in a small metal mount that easily came off some of the cards. Furthermore, the size of the stones was tiny. Think smaller baby earrings.

Fast forward a decade and a half and Topps brought us some special 1/1 Diamond parallels with gem stones to coincide with the company’s 60-year anniversary. The design was much approved over one of the rival companies from 15 years earlier. But they were 1/1’s Good luck finding a card of your guy.

And then in recent years, Panini America seems to have taken a liking to the idea of gem stones and cards and the company has used diamonds and what appear to be rubies in some of its higher-end brands.

Watching from a distance, I really wasn’t overly impressed with the cards, or really the notion of the gem stones in the cards. Truth be told, my sour experience with the inserts from 1996 and the difficulty actually obtaining one of the 2011 Topps cards really put me in a negative mindset as it pertains to such cards.

And the more recent Panini cards to me looked more like a way for the company to justify the price point at which the MSRP was being set rather than something collectors actually wanted. While it’s completely unfair of me to make such a broad assumption, it’s pretty clear that there is at least some truth to my thought as the secondary market on these cards remains relatively soft given the quality of card, the fact they contain actual stones, and the limited serial number nature of the cards.

Side note: I’m assuming these stones are real as there is a statement of guarantee on the reverse of the cards. And yes, I have seen some of the videos on YouTube calling their legitimacy into question. But it should be noted that while some didn’t pass the test of jewelers reviewing the cards, many did.

That said, I decided to buy one. Why? Because I found one of my all-time favorite player, Roger Clemens, … and the price seemed cheap.

This 2015 Panini National Treasures Multi-Sport Flawless Diamond card shown above is limited to 20 copies and shows Clemens in his University of Texas Longhorns garb. It has a few factors that might keep it out of the hardcore Clemens collectors, which kept the price low I think, but for $30 it seemed like a good addition to my collection.

So, do I feel any differently now that I have one of these nice, shiny Flawless Diamond cards in hand?

Yes and no. The quality on these cards is fantastic. Thick card stock and flashy foil help the “bling” factor if you will. I do think this one is a cool addition to my collection. But are they for everyone? No.

For the rippers and flippers, these are merely the equivalent of pocket change — nice to have as they are better than a pocket full of lint, or premium base cards, because they’ll eventually decrease the net cost of your break. But they are hardly the chase cards that collectors will hunt with an open wallet, which in turn would make a flipper a small fortune.

For player collectors, I think they present an interesting opportunity especially with prices for most guys being relatively cheap. And by relatively cheap I mean in the $20-$60 range for a hit that hails from a product that commands several hundred dollars sight unseen.

For everyone else it just depends if you want to spend your money on a piece of cardboard with a small diamond. Bottom line, that’s all this really is. There is no significance to the stone, or the paper in which it has been embedded.

Collecting baseball cards is a funny hobby. If you’ve been in the game long enough you’ve seen how collectors latch onto certain things and then at some point they complete abandon them — the Sportflix/Sportflics technology.

In the mid 1980s Sportflics was a innovative brand that essentially made it possible to view three images with just a flick of the wrist. If you’re looking for me to explain it, you’re out of luck. I understand it just enough to figure there are actually three pictures on the card and the plastic coating makes your eye only see one image at a time.

The brand disappeared after 1990, and then resumed in 1994 as it was produced by Pinnacle. And then in 1995, the brand morphed into Spotflix (notice the “x” instead of the “cs”) and the sister brand “UC3” was born that same year. The sub brand was not quite as cool as the originals, but they had the same technology. In my opinion it was a bust.

But the cards were still different, and being a Pinnacle Brand, the set had inserts and parallel. The packs were a bit more pricey at the time and not everyone could afford them. I know I certain veered away from them.

Alas here we are in 2016 and one day recently I was lucky enough to find two plastic cases containing some 1995 UC3 cards. and with the price being $2.65 per plastic case (I’m pretty sure these cases cost about that much by themselves) I figured I’d snag them both to see what I was missing at the time.

These two cases were filled with stars as you can see here.

And they contained the only two true rookie cards in the set, Hideo Nomo and Mark Grudzielanek.

The cases also had their share of inserts. The Cyclone Squad inserts were 1:4 packs (Got two Ripkens, that’s cool); the UC3 In Motion were 1:18 and the Clear Shots were 1:24. To understand how cool this is you have to understand that the latter two insert sets were tougher to pull at the time.

And then there were parallels, which in classic Pinnacle Brand fashion, were dubbed “Artist Proofs” and were inserted some one in every box and a half, or 1:36 packs. While neither of these three will break the bank to acquire, it’s hard to argue with the three guys who were hiding in theses cases: Sammy Sosa, Joe Carter and Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett. These parallels

About four years ago when my Thrift Treasures series began I discovered a local thrift shop that often sold cards 10 or 20 at a time for $1. Usually the store would receive boxes of cards and they’d dump them into some large plastic container. The price varied — as I noted earlier — depending on the cashier. Either way, the price was hardly something to quibble over. I mean where can you select the cards you want and pay either a nickle or a dime a piece?

Anyhow, that store is still there. It’s still open. It still has bins of cards. Problem is they have not had anything new in the boxes in almost a year. Every time I’d returned to the bin, I’d see the same stacks of 1986 Topps football and 1991-1992 Pro Set Hockey that’d been pilfered dozens of times over.

But that changed this week. I stopped in and it appears that someone dumped a small collection of hockey cards (not my forte) and some random 1996 football stuff. Go figure.

I dove into the bins and spent about 30 minutes shuffling through thousands of commons — including a large majority of which were the aforementioned Topps football and Pro Set hockey. All I came out with was 20 cards that I purchased for a single dollar. And even though hockey isn’t what I collect, I figure I should be able to flip them for something else that I might actually want. And it that fails, then at least I saved these from getting scrapped. Yep, I’m a hero like that.

So, without further adieu, here they are, the 20 cards that Cardboard Icons saved from the landfill!

Lets get these out of the way: I didn’t Neid these … (knee slapper!)

The great thing (I’m kidding) about the 1990s was the abundance of unlicensed cards. Actually, in their own way they were kind of fun. For team and player collectors who were about a decade away from seeing the world of parallels upon parallels and hits, they liked to have new issues to chase. Well, collectors of then super prospect David Neid of the newborn Colorado Rockies had a limited release to chase in this small Pro Motion set of what appears to be composed of four cards. The cool part: they’re serial numbered to just 10,000 copies! I guess that was a magic number in the early 1990s, that’s what all the Donruss “Elite Series” inserts were limited to.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, 1991 Topps may have had the best photographs in recently memory of any base set. That said, this Oscar Azocar image featuring him supposedly balancing a baseball between two bats always captivated me. Funny thing is I look at this card now and I can clearly see the dowel that holds that ball to the bat. It should be noted that this card would be even greater if it were his rookie card. It is his first Topps card, but Azocar had rookie cards in 1990 Fleer Update and Score Traded. Grrrr.

Quick hitter: remember these throw away offer cards? I actually like them because when I was a kid I never took the time to look at them. Now I continue to hope that I find weird Topps items like this hat in a local thrift store. I actually wonder if anyone actually ordered these …

And this 1996 Score “Field Force” parallel (feels like paper, not glossy) Jay Novacek had to come home with me.

It should be noted that the reason I kept digging through these boxes was the abundance of 1996 football cards. Why you ask? Well, I was hoping there was Ray Lewis rookie card just sitting there. Clearly there wasn’t.

And now onto the hockey portion of the post … where, oddly enough, is where I spent the majority of my 100 pennies!

Rookie cards. Who needs a 1990-1991 Upper Deck (American) Owen Nolan or a 1997-1998 Olli Jokinen?! Love that Nordiques logo by the way.

Inserts and parallels. That’s what collecting was all about in the early 1990s. When it became apparent that inserts were an instant money maker, card companies decided to make parallels of base cards, inserting them at a rate of one per pack. One of the first was 1992 Topps, which placed one gold foil card in every pack. And then through subsequent years companies made different types of parallels, which were increasingly more difficult to obtain. In 1994, the Score/Pinnacle company began using Dufex technology on their cards, calling the parallels in the Pinnacle base brand the “Museum Collection.” And then they decided to create the supposedly superior Artist’s Proof versions, which were inserted about one per box, and according to Beckett, limited to about 1,000 sets. Continue reading →